Dissatisfied with working in an airport in England, Ron and a friend went
to see the movie "Alien" where it occurred to him that someone got paid for
making all those models out of plastic.

Thornton then left his airport job, took most of his remaining money and
purchased plastics and other materials and began building and photographing
models. He took the photographs and used them to get a job with BBC
television.

Ron has since worked on the Peter Davidson Doctor Who series, then designed
and built spaceships for final season of Blake's 7 (Ron built the Scorpio
in his living room, in actuality he built about seven different versions of
the Scorpio; different sized models, partial models etc.) and Tripods, all
British television series. Thornton then moved to Los Angles where he
worked on props and miniatures for Real Genius, Class of 1999, Robot-Jox,
T2 (in which he created the battle rifles), The Addams Family, Highlander
2, Critters and Spaceballs. Prior to working on Babylon 5, Thornton worked
on Captain Power and the Soldiers of the Future television show where he
first saw computer generated images for television special effects.

Television and computer screens are arrays of small dots or "pixels." Each
pixel is assigned a color, contrast and intensity and when thousands of
these pixels are combined, an image results. Computer paint programs allow
artists to arrange pixels to form pictures. 3-D image programs allow
artists to manipulate those pixels to simulate images of objects as if they
actually existed in three dimensional space.

The pilot "The Gathering"
was rendered by eight interconnected Amiga 2000
computers with Video Toaster boards which were connected to an IBM computer
that stored the images in five gigabytes of memory. Foundation Imaging's
computational power has increased tremendously with each work station now
being equivalent to the original eight Amigas and Ron's being the
equivalent to sixteen Amigas.

The computer generated effects industry is still in its infancy and with
only one exception, all the effects for Babylon 5 have been created by
Thornton and his team. The one exception was Jason Ironheart's god-like
torso effect at the end of "Mind War"
from Babylon 5's first season.

Eric: "Fans from the first season of Babylon 5 (like myself) have
wanted to know if LightWave has a pre-packaged torso in it,
because of the Jason Ironheart god-like creature in "Mind War."

Thornton: "No, That is an off-the-shelf-bought database that we
modified."

Eric: "Have you had anything else that you've been able to use
right off the shelf?"

Thornton: "I wish! Nobody's really got anything, we've got to build the
stuff from scratch. This show's got a look and it's got to stay
in line with that look."

Models are created in Lightwave's 3-D modeling program in an elaborate
connect-the-dots fashion that places the dots in three dimensional space.
The dots are used as references for surfaces (polygons) which form the
actual exterior of the computer models.

To help create and improve that look, Thornton and his team have built
physical models which were photographed and scanned into their computers.

Thornton: "We've built models and scanned them. Basically it's just a
flat object, it's just a flat piece of plastic that we've scored
and painted and panel lined."

"You can get more organic patterns. Anybody who paints with
paint will tell you that it's totally different to paint on a
computer. There are certain things that paint does; like for
instance you can get very, very thin paint, brush it over
something and then wipe it off and it will go into the grooves,
there's no way you can synthesize that on the computer, that
sort of 'capillary bleed' effect that only happens with thin
washes of paint. And so you can get some really gorgeous
organic textures which you can't get any other way and there's
been a couple of times we've done it.

According to Thornton, this is done just for that special organic effect
which is then "bit mapped" onto the surface of the electronically
constructed ship.

Jason Ironheart's ship (Mind War)
was the first ship Ron built via computer
(and was also seen in the pilot "The Gathering")
in tribute to some of his
"teachers" and is reminiscent of the Zep One from the British television
show Captain Zep.

Ron designed Babylon 5 (including the Cobra Bays) mostly by himself and
"built it" in two weeks on the computer where a conventional model may have
required six weeks or more and a larger team!

Some of the ships that are seen on the Babylon 5 series have actual
physical counterparts. The blocky transport ships were among the models
that Thornton created and photographed to land a job in Special Effects.

Steve Berg and Ron split the designing of the ships of Babylon 5 about
50/50.

Eric: "Ron, how did you get the idea of using computers for creating
Special Effects?"

Thornton: "It just sort of happened. I ended up getting one of these
machines, the Video Toaster, and I started playing with it and it
was like 'give it a year or so and this could work.'

"This was way after Captain Power. Captain Power had turned me
off it (Computer Generated Special Effects), 'cause the stuff
didn't look very good and there was no texture mapping per se.
It was all very blocky looking, the animation wasn't that hot
and they had real problems delivering the stuff; it was just
taking them forever to do it."

"I had an Amiga for a while and it had a number of 3D packages
which I sort of toyed with, but the Toaster was the first decent
one."

Eric: "How long did it take from realizing that the Toaster could be
used for effects work until Foundation Imaging was up and
running?"

Thornton: "It was probably about a year and a half, during which
time I was
working with Todd Rundgren in Northern California on one of his
shows.

"But a lot of it was the wait. Once I convinced Joe
[Straczynski] and John Copeland that this could be done this way
it suddenly opened up a whole new venue and I did a bunch of
tests; then we went in and pitched it once more to Peter
[Ledger]. At least this time they could see that we could do
it, that we could create some of this imagery."

Eric: "What is the cost of producing special effects with
computers as
opposed to those done with conventional means?"

Thornton: "I'd say that we're between a third and two thirds the cost."

Eric: "What are the basic steps in creating a CGI scene?"

Thornton: "Well, you build your model. You pull it into the
layout. You
light it. You shoot it. It's very similar to having a motion
control stage except you've got no limitations."

The Starfury design is unique in science fiction and Thornton says that it
is in no way based on that of the Star Wars X-Wing Fighters and are more of
a tribute to Ron Cobbs' designs in "The Last Starfighter."

The Starfury is able to move more realistically in flight, can move in
one vector, spin on it's axis to track and fight other ships and not engage
in "Battle of Britain" style dog fights (that are favored in other films).

Thornton: "If you actually think about it, the Starfury is a totally
impossible model to motion control. Unless you did it on wires,
because of the way the engine deflector plates are at the back,
you couldn't put a mounting rod up the middle of it because the
mounting rod would eclipse the plates that were rolling behind
it. The only way you could mount it is from the front. It's
just one of those 'impossible models.'"

Foundation Imaging started out with five people and has grown to fifteen
for the Babylon 5 series. Thornton, along with his partner Paul
Beigle-Bryant (who created the software network that enables rendering and
who also performs computer hardware repairs), senior animators, Mojo (from
New York) and John Teska supervise other computer animators. Computer
animator Mark Swain, Effects Coordinator Shannon Casey and Cherry Hitch
(who does 2-D rotoscope work on the virtual sets and overlays such
effects as laser fire) are the core of talented people who make the
computer generated effects of Babylon 5 a reality.

Effects are designed on an accelerated Amiga 2000 with a Video Toaster
board in it, using LightWave 3-D and Modeler 3-D.

Eric: "How is building computer models different from building
physical models?"

Thornton: "You still have to build the models, only you use polygons and
pixels instead of plastic and paintbrushes."

Another unique organic look to Babylon 5 is the shape of the Vorlon vessels
such as Ambassador Kosh's ship. The inspiration for the squid-like vessel
is as original as it is surprising:

Eric: "One of the really unique looking vessels right from the start
was the Vorlon Cruiser. It's rather squid-like in look. Was
that the inspiration for the ship?"

Thornton: "It's a clove of garlic, actually. I got the idea driving
through the town of Gilroy which is kind of like the garlic
capital of the world and has this absolutely delicious smell."

The clove of garlic grew into an organic ship which Thornton used to sell
the idea of Organic Technology to Straczynski to be used by some of the
alien races.

Thornton: "If you have space traveling ability and genetic manipulation,
why can't you grow a ship suited to the environment of space? I
had this idea of walking into a spaceship like stepping into the
mouth of a whale and going for a ride."

Eric: "The Vorlon ship exterior is sort of mottled and is fractal
generated. I know about that and Kosh's environment suit has a
similar look. Was that intentional?"

Thornton: "They sort of evolved together."

Using computers for special effects also allows for some rather intricate
and spectacular effects which might be impossible to create realistically
using conventional means, such as the Starfury launches. J. Michael
Straczynski had envisioned ships on platforms that would flip the ships
over and out into space or to launch ships from the front of the rotating
station but Thornton had other suggestions, including pointing out that the
only way to launch ships from the front of the station would be through the
central spinning bay because of the rotation of the station. As for the
Starfury platform launch:

Thornton: "The easiest way to launch the ship and save energy is to
literally just drop the ship out, you've dropped it out . . .
it's already got momentum . . . and depending on where in the
rotational cycle you drop the ship it decides what sort of
direction it's going to go away from the station"

Eric: "You just have to be careful not to hit the non-rotating arm!"

Thornton: "Uh, yeah! [laughs] I think that would be kind of like
one of
those World War One cannons that fired through the propellers.
The whole thing [launch cycle] would be disabled when that
[non-rotating arm] came around."

Eric: "What was your most technically complex shot so far? I
remember a shot from "The Gathering"
of two hundred Vorlon
vessels exiting Babylon 5's Jump Gate (which beat the record
number of On Screen ships in "The Return of the Jedi")."

Thornton: "That was actually a piece of cake. It's just making up
a bunch
of them and layering them and layering them. It's just one of
those things that's really easy to do on the computer but is
really incredibly difficult to do anywhere else.

"I think actually, in terms of tweaking . . . I think one of
(the technically) hardest shots that's paid off very well was
John Teska'a shot of these little demons all clustered over
Londo's back [The Geometry of Shadows]
which was very
interesting because we had to motion-match the demons and move
them along with Londo. And we had to do it manually; there was
no automatic tracking like there is in some of the more
expensive packages so it was all done manually, by eye and it
was very, very tasty. I was extremely pleased with that.

"Unfortunately it's a shame because John Flinn [Director of
Photography John C. Flinn, III A.S.C.] lit the scene really dark
and so you can't really see what's going on. They [the demons]
were scrapping on his back and were hitting one another, it was
kind of like having the Three Stooges strapped to his back and
was incredibly funny!"

One major similarity between computer generating effects and that of
conventional motion control effects for an ongoing series is a lack of
production time. The time between being handed a completed script and
generating the thirty or so effect shots needed for a complete episode is
only a matter of weeks. Each computer generated frame for
"The Gathering"
took almost one hour to render but that time has been substantially reduced
to approximately twenty minutes. Considering that there are about
thirty frames generated per second, time is one of Foundation Imaging's
most important factors.

Thornton: "There's an icon that you click [at each of the computer
stations] before you leave your station and automatically that
station becomes a slave and starts rendering images. By the
time we leave at night, the whole system is rendering. We try
not to waste a single minute!"

Much like enthusiastic Babylon 5 fans, Thornton wishes that he could know
what will happen later down the closely guarded Straczynski story line but
for reasons differing from fans. This would enable Thornton to plan more
exciting visuals. Thornton believes that such incredible scenes such as
the battle of "The Line"
["And the Sky Full of Stars"] could have been made
even better with more time for planning.

Eric: "What shots from the series do you think could have been
better,
if you'd had more time?"

Thornton: "Oh, the battle of "The Line" is one I wish we'd had more time
to prepare for. It was supposed to be really emotive but it
wound up kind of ordinary."

"I'll tell you what I'd really like to do. I'd like to do a
really decent scene with the Minbari Cruisers. I think the
Minbari Cruisers are really cool looking and I'd really like to
do a decent battle scene with them."

With Foundation Imaging's increased ability to create dynamic images in a
short period of time, there are approximately thirty ship effects scenes in
each episode but instead of visualizing more and more such shots in later
episodes as computational speed increases, Thornton has asked that number
of shots to remain a constant, giving him the ability to concentrate on
quality instead of quantity.

However Foundation Imaging does more than just space ship scenes and these
special effects sometimes are mixed with the live action plates shot for
the series. This requires a supervisor on set to aid the director with the
special needs for shooting background plates (for Virtual sets and "Blue
Screen" shots) which are later given to Foundation Imaging.

Eric: "What's required for Virtual sets? Do you have to help
directors with what's needed for Blue Screens and so on?"

Thornton: "Virtual sets are basically matte paintings; there's a
supervisor that's on set who basically watches over all the 'On
Set' stuff and that's Ted Rae this year. Virtual sets are a
technique that's been around, as I said, for a long time."

Back at Foundation Imaging, Cherry Hitch is then responsible for 2-D
rotoscoping, virtual sets and overlays such as laser fire and so on. She
must take the background plates and introduce the computer generated
effects onto them.

"Blue Screen" shots are live action plates that have a specific area which
is color-coded that is capable of being digitally "removed" so that special
effects can be "placed" into the shot.

Virtual sets are sets which do not exist in the real world. Actors perform
(again) before a color-coded area, then later an entire set is painted in
Foundation Imaging's computers and inserted around the actors. Examples of
this sort of imaging include the Narn War Cruiser bridge set and the
Babylon 5 Observation Deck where the Centauri Emperor met with Captain
Sheridan (The Coming of Shadows).

Another, similar effect is Matte Painting which also can be done on
Foundation Imaging's computers. The bi-level Zocalo visualized in the
opening title sequence of each of Season Two's episodes are examples where
one plate of the Zocalo was shot, then a second plate with actors walking
along specifically defined areas was computer inserted over the first.

Eric: "I know you're busy right now creating effects for the third
season of Babylon 5, but has Foundation Imaging produced effects
for other shows or movies as well?"

Thornton: "Oh yeah. Right now we're working on a show of mine called
"Hypernauts" a sort of kid's show."

"We did a show last year called 'Journey to Mars' which is . . .
not great. And I don't know if they're ever going to show it on
TV, it's that 'not great.' When you're asked to do rubbish, you
have to do it. I mean the shots were good but they were very,
very long, I mean we had shots flying over the Mars landscape
that were like a minute and a half long so it's like 'go to
sleep, go out and get yourself a cup of coffee and a sandwich'
and come back and the shot's still running.

"There was this kind of strange director that they had that was
coming up with all this stuff."

But with the talents of Ron Thornton and his team at Foundation Imaging,
imaginative producer J. Michael Straczynski and the gifted directors of
Babylon 5, computers are sure to keep producing attention-riveting special
effects.